Brandon Minh Tsai

You leave the teacher first, in your head, before the wheel does it for you. Nadim Haddar's apartment in Pittsburgh is dark and every sleeper in the building is under. You are standing at the kitchen counter in his heavy body with the laptop open, and the stubble you've been rubbing for ten days is rasping under your thumb. The gap in his teeth finds the tip of your tongue again. You know that tic by now.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the part you would not say out loud. Ten days and twenty-one hours, and tonight his students' essays sat in a stack by the sink, forty-one of them, each one needing a kind sentence at the bottom. You stood over them and felt nothing, not even dread. You wanted to be a man who had no stack. You pay. You spin.

You are face-down. Something cold-warm presses your cheek, a sheet gone slack with sleep-sweat. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood in it has gone to needles. Your breath was ragged a second ago and then it is not. You pull the arm up and roll over onto your back, and your hands fold on your chest all by themselves. Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains and lies across your ribs.

Then the things touching you start to talk.

The shirt is thin from washing, soft as skin, and the collar has stretched. It hands you a morning: his hands pulling it off the floor pile because the other shirts were dirtier. He sniffed the armpit, shrugged, and that shrug was shame so old it had turned into habit. The sweatpants come next. The drawstring is knotted, because he never unties it. He steps out of them and steps back in, and there is a girl's laugh somewhere in that, a recent one, saying *you live in these*. The ache that follows is a name you do not yet have. Her. It sits under his breastbone like a swallowed coin.

The mattress under your spine is firm and cheap. A heavy afternoon rises out of it: he lies here at four in the afternoon with blackout curtains failing, trying to sleep before the night shift, listening to a lawnmower. The money is a number he checks too often. It is never enough and never quite catastrophic. Somewhere nearby is the smell of the vape, mango and warm metal. Your mouth wants it, the body's craving arriving before any thought of yours.

The body is soft around the middle and narrow in the shoulder, short, a little sore in the lower back from nights of sitting. There is a stiffness in the right hip, a driver's hip. Your thumb finds the inside of your left forearm and the tattoo there, raised slightly, the lines wobbling. It gives you the shame at once: a friend's apartment, a cheap needle, a design he picked at nineteen and has hidden under sleeves ever since. Underneath is the quiet he keeps, a candle on his mother's shelf, incense, three bows he still does before sleep when he remembers. Tonight he forgot.

Then you lift your hands in the streetlight and turn them over. They are smaller than Nadim's, and they know things: the curve of a steering wheel, the tap that accepts a fare.

You look up at the ceiling, then at nothing, and say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine."

The wheel is already somewhere in you, humming. You wonder whether it will be an hour, or a year, before it begins to pull.